4.29.2010

A poem to celebrate Mae’s third birthday,written on the bus ride down to visit--

No one taught me to talk to the sun,though we came face to face every dawn,unacknowledged friend with only one name,one-way conversation at the speed of light,now my reply, late, but long before never:Hello, you big stare of fire, kiss of whitherthis morning through the mussed bus window,you mist-melting flare at last night’s late frost,you shape-shifter of pear and apple trees,igniting white torches and bonfires that burnyear after year whether people are near or not,your hot breath on the rivers, cooking upthe smoke that cloaks our way right now,souvenir of primordial soup from wherewe all came, oh, yes, familiar face, staring inat my neighbors reading about pedicures, filling out computer forms for truckers, re-wrapping hair from night to white-cloudedskyblue scarf. In ten minutes we get off and you’ll lick us all over like newborns,your tongue on our eyes and mouths, that morningkiss sparkles in the grass like the dew of uncountedstars, you just one, but ours, known enough to talk to.Minnie Bruce Pratt

4.28.2010

A poem about visiting my grandchildren--what I never expected when I was "coming out"as a lesbian mother over thirty years ago! anda poem about holding onto our children's hands(and minds) in the face of "Homeland Security"and the new terrible attacks on immigrant workersin Arizona:

In line for the up-north bus, just left the children,the next little ones, asleep from our gallivantto yesterday’s park, their father running, hands out-stretched over them across four asphalt lanesthe cars in wait, purring. My in-line neighborsvisit in creole French, Arabic, Spanish, the Latinaahead, arms crossed, has knee-high, shoulder-highgirls, and another tall as her, arms-crossed, apart,who comes up silent at the last minute to pullthe heavy luggage as we board. The bus driver asksthem extra questions, the two oldest mouths fencedagainst the wrong answers. I eye-skim the waitingroom, who’s there, corner glimpse, crimp of a woman’shat or hair, top-knotted, nodding, and that or the springrain runs me back to looking across our yard, fugitivebeauty, something more than my life, breaks acrossthe grass, a quail hen chivvying her tiny covey fast,her feathered curl, frail wisp of question on her head.Holding Mae in my arms, her little feet beating to getdown, I can walk! I can carry! What we’re doing is more than silhouettes pasted on a SUV rear window,the fictional normal family tally, more than the state’sdanger road sign, man woman child hand-in-hand,running at the southern border. Holding Alden’s handas he tightropes on the fallen tree limb, him slippingagain, again his fingers almost twisting from my grasp.

4.22.2010

A poem for all of us striving to cometo consciousness and survive in our now:

In the hallway the sweet homey smell of gas,like the blue flame gush through the crinkledface of the space heater, I huddled with my cousinunder the covers, hidden in our feathered hold.In the hallway, the smell of comfort and danger,the door broken down, the neighbor so deep in sleephe can almost not be wakened to faces bending over.In bed with you later I hold your hand, so often blue-tipped with cold, I wait for our shared warmth.The room isn’t dark, the moon uses its mirrorto reflect the pale sunlight of night on us. Am Idone with longing to live back in my own past? with the poison fantasy of living another life?

4.21.2010

On April 12, Leslie & I joined the BuffaloInternational Action Center and othersin a protest against the racist, sexist, anti-gay“Tea Party” movement.

The man with the rattlesnake coiled on his chestyells in my face, the battleships loom battlementsabove us, and the crowd clanks over a gang plankto hear the fulminating speaker throw his words.They say they’re not racist, they say they don’t hate.We say words won’t make it so, not even our ownmarked on placards we hold as shields againstthree hundred of them, thirteen of us, that’s whywe are here, chanting Fight, fight, fight, the slantslice of our hands, our signs, hold a patch of grassfor us to root stubbornly there, a thicket of ideas:Corporate greed breeds racism. A job is a right.Now three men shout at the perimeter, Get a job! as if to battle them about the future isn’t work.

An hour later we’re at a Thruway rest stop, fastfood, faster cars, we eat at seventy miles an hour,no sign anything has happened, except a thindigital proliferation of messages, interruptions,interpolations, a small line in Boston is snakingthrough the bigots, the struggle for the presentmoment from which the future comes, shouting.

Yesterday the maple tree dropped its own realityat my feet, a twig waving red-green paws, curledwith little finger muscles of seed. Over my headand further than I can see the tree tops brightenin a green sunrise. The beautiful moment between,when something has begun and is not finished yet.

4.20.2010

I was another person. I am another person.The spring rain falls on the cement sidewalk,the red brick, the green grass. That was whereI was young—where I——The mist streamedup from the hot cement walk, then the suncut away the gauze and the spring was gone.The person who stood there and the personwho remembers. This time the rain as I walkout of the DMV, from questions put by the state,never trivial: Am I married? Am I male orfemale? No way to drive away. The sun breaksthrough the car window, on the radio a viola,civilized violence cuts to my gut, frequencyof old anger there, to take that in my hand,seesaw, bend and bow to my will, sharper,eager to cut through to what the words wrap,the power that inscribes on every form black-and-white categories and demandsan answer: Male or female? U.S. citizen?

4.15.2010

A poem for how our names are youngerand older than we are, always, and the eldersknow both our older and younger selves.

My strange name, two centuries doubled,my grandmother’s name so much trouble,can’t squeeze all the way onto medical forms,jumps over the computer hopscotch spaces,I’m not wholly me unless I hyphenate, re-fabricate my name. This morning in the hallmy co-worker touched my hand and spokemy whole name, home, wait, a few moreminutes, and I and the others ran throughthe shaded porch, someone older calledour names, Don’t you all let that door slambehind you! said, I guess I better get readyto go, lingering. I caught myself, left handpushing the screen door, right hand wavingbye, goodbye, their hands slipping throughmy closed fingers. Sometimes I walkedwith them a few slow steps to the car door.Why didn’t I touch them one more time?Why didn’t I? My hand on her shoulder.Minnie Bruce Pratt

4.14.2010

Why is that mountain pink? ask the grandchildren.We are at the fish-fry place, outside, staring at spilledblush across the valley, and I, taller because older,have gone nose to nose with maple red spring whiskers,and so can answer why. That’s my work, ask and answer.

At the maple festival, the buzz saw cuts slabs of silence,fallen trees. Inside me the engine thumps like an old, ownbeat but why? Repeated thud, hiss of blood. Sound of workin my town I didn’t know I still carried, the sawmill enginewheel, blade, big steam lungs, whistle scream, breathnot heard until it stops turning and calling in the throat.

Jamie wore a red coat to class, came in, took it off,sat down and asked questions. Until her car slid offthe early morning Thruway, skewed road where therewas none, no way to know exact what happened next,no teacher’s answer to her death. Only whatever workwas hers is done, well, her friends say. One stayed in school, not driven over the edge by racist serratedwords, for Jamie said, It’s not you, not who or what, but why—

4.08.2010

Glass bubbles float, baubles on the pond,fire on water with the lilies and the lotus,good for nothing, useless. All I want to dois drift alongside that unjustifiable beauty.The glassblower lunges and stabs, throwsthe glowing water until it freezes. To makea poem doesn’t seem like use, but phrases,even broken into fragments, can be heldfor years in some pocket of memory, feltdim and retrieved as I do a flimsy shimmer,a glass-blooming flower stalk in cold weather.improbable, something to spy out as the skydarkens, some glimmer of sound, a belovedword that says, Not yet, that says, Never.

4.07.2010

Whose voice comes through me now?For years I just repeated the words.Well, that’s how you learn as a child,the palaver problem. After a whileas I moved my mouth I heard whatI was saying. Some of my studentsare saying they don’t want to listento a CEO at their graduation, theyreject a banking concept of education,they aren’t blank accounts to depositideas or money into, they want to hearsomeone they don’t owe money to, not JPMorgan Chase rich, richer, richeston interest they’ll pay for fifteen years,the $27,455 loans on average, the ragethey are commencing with, and whatjobs? Where will they live? Their cars?The street? They say predator and thief,their work stolen before they pass Go,monopoly capital in control of the board.This is the future we’ve been told, hoard,and crush the other. But there is the suddensitting at our desks when we see our handsdigitally click like a marionette’s sticks,raising the questions: And whose work done?What do we want from our opposable thumbs?Not games, and not to build thick bank vaultwalls, set inside our work’s locked-up worth.Now these young hands up, demanding halt.

4.06.2010

The elm tree, hip deep in snow last month,now thrashes, furious as performing a sonata,through every crook, turn and branching outto the leaf buds at the last twigs. The treehas a twin dancing in the glass tower opposite,they have each other and the blue sky glint.At their feet I am lonelier than both, asphaltparking lot, up the inner stairs, at the topa sketching class fetches the view from deepinside the camera obscura of their eye: trees,high-rise cranes, humans too small to matter,the valley spread over their big white pads.I carry this poem around in a palm notebook,writing illegibly as I walk. Thank you, words,for being another self to talk to, for your natterthat has crept again through cranny and crook.

4.01.2010

“The fundamental frequency is the lowest frequencycomponent of a signal that excites (imparts energy)to a system,” says the Wiki.

Here and there a big electronic ear sticks outfrom a house, odd as ours are, tilted to scoopinvisible motion from the air, thump it downon the drum inside our bony skull, tiltedlike the red woodpecker head this morningin the dead oak, listening for insects beetlingthrough bark, then the spear stick beak, the rim shot crack, now six beats in this poem,because perhaps it’s not sound but vibrationwe crave, evidence of motion, how I brokedown and cried, hearing your voice first timeon the answer machine, that low frequency,how many chances missed, how many took,perhaps not all, not yet, I said to myself Whatis happening? standing on a fundamental wave,like ground rising and falling under my bare feet.